Very lossy video compression.

video-crusher is used to make videos worse for artistic or technical reasons.
Videos get deconstructed into frames at a specified sample frame rate.
These frames are saved in a frame directory and can then be modified in their resolution, color depth, etc.
video-crusher is able to recombine them into a new video if desired.
It is also possible to reduce the audio bandwidth or audio bit depth.

$ video-crusher INPUTFILE OUTPUTFILE

The video files to work on.
OUTPUTFILE will also be used as the name for the frame directory.

$ video-crusher --verbose

Print full debug information.

$ video-crusher -colors INT

Reduces the number of color levels per channel to a specified amount.
Acceptable values: 2 - 256

$ video-crusher -fps INT

The frame rate to sample the input video at.
Defaults to the input frame rate.

$ video-crusher -cspace SELECTION

Convert video to this color space. (RGB = 24-bit color, L = 8-bit grayscale, 1 = 1-bit grayscale)
Defaults to RGB.

$ video-crusher -crushwidth INT -crushheight INT

Resolution video will be downsampled to.

$ video-crusher -crushfactor INT

Alternative way of setting -crushwidth and -crushheight.
Reduces input video resolution by a set factor.

$ video-crusher --upsample

Returns frames to a higher resolution after downsampling.
This preserves sharp pixel edges during video compression.

$ video-crusher -upsamplewidth INT -upsampleheight INT

Resolution to upsample frames to.
Defaults to the input video resolution.

$ video-crusher --rmframeimg

Remove the frame directory after video recombination.

$ video-crusher --novideo

Don't recombine frames into a video.

$ video-crusher --noaudio

Don't add audio back into the output video.
Please set this flag if the input video contains no audio.

$ video-crusher --overwrite

Overwrite files that already exist at the specified output location.

$ video-crusher -lowpass INT

Low-pass audio at a specified frequency.

$ video-crusher -highpass INT

High-pass audio at a specified frequency.

$ video-crusher -audiobits INT

Reduce the audio bit resolution to the specified level.

$ video-crusher -falsecolor PALETTE_FILE

Supply a false color palette to be applied to the video.

A false color palette is a text file consisting of 256 newline separated 24-bit color values.
Example palettes are supplied in the "palettes/" directory.
Palettes are encoded as ASCII.
When applying a palette, the image is first converted to grayscale, and the grayscale value is then used to look up an RGB color in the palette.
All example palettes use the .vcpal filename extension.

Input video used for examples: Noisestorm - Crab Rave (Official Music Video)

$ video-crusher in.mp4 out.mp4 -fps 10 -crushfactor 10 -cspace L -colors 4 --upsample -lowpass 500  

Output video

$ video-crusher in.mp4 out.mp4 -fps 10 -crushfactor 4 -falsecolor palettes/nipy_spectral.vcpal --upsample -audiobits 1  

Output video

$ video-crusher in.mp4 out.mp4 -fps 10 -crushfactor 17 -cspace L -colors 2 --upsample  

Output video

$ video-crusher in.mp4 out.mp4 -fps 10 -crushfactor 17 -cspace 1 --upsample  --noaudio

Output video

Decompressing high resolution or long videos to bitmaps takes a lot of drive space.

The example palettes were made from matplotlib color maps.

• python-pillow
• opencv
• ffmpeg-python

Published under GPL-3.0 license.